On February 20 and 21, 2026, in the evocative jewel of Teatro Ivelise, just steps away from the Colosseum, the play “Intima Distanza” was staged, written and directed by Massimo Stinco, starring Thomas Borgatti and Enrico Toschi.
The performance is inspired by the autobiographical novel “Separate Rooms” by Pier Vittorio Tondelli, a work that deeply explores the classic pillars of our relationship with love, fear, society, identity, and loss.
Speaking about love is not easy without falling into rhetoric, without being trapped in conventional stigmas, and at the same time skillfully avoiding the temptation to provoke, transgress, ideologize, or politicize.
The play tells the story of a homosexual love between two young men, Enrico and Thomas, felt since adolescence, fled from and denied, yet inescapable until death and beyond.
On a carpet of flower petals, highlighting its fragility, love unfolds across time and space with delicacy, pain, doubt, joy, and distance. These two young men must not only confront social prejudice, but also escape the stereotype of the “gay couple” – conventional and conformist – that fits into a socially “acceptable” cliché.
Enrico and Thomas choose to nurture their love in “separate rooms” thousands of kilometers apart, writing to each other, losing and finding one another again, loving tenderly and traveling – one a writer, the other a musician.
The full nudity on stage, far from being provocative, conveys essentiality and the rejection of all masks and hypocrisy.
It is an intense experience, not only about homosexual love, but about life itself, about the catalytic and contradictory power of distance, about the alternation of presence and absence, about the pain of loss in the eternal struggle between Eros and Thanatos – the two impulses that permeate humanity.
“Speaking about love today,” writes director Massimo Stinco,
“is very difficult for me, as I have unfortunately always believed little in love – certainly because of lived experiences, but not only. Especially homosexual love still raises many thoughts, questions, doubts, and reflections in me.
The show was born from a specific request to ‘create a performance about love in all its forms.’ Letting my imagination take flight, I reread Tondelli’s novel ‘Separate Rooms,’ where love is experienced in a somewhat unusual way. Paradoxically, I believe in this form of love, dominated and enriched by physical distance. Through love, but also through death. For me, Eros and Thanatos go hand in hand.
The performance includes several musical pieces that serve as the true soundtrack of their story. On stage, I recreated a carpet of flowers as I did in my ‘Edward II,’ which also dealt with love.
The show contains scenes of full male nudity.
‘Intima Distanza’ has been staged in Milan and, in English, in Viljandi, Estonia, and in Birmingham, England.”
A hymn to art and aesthetics, crossed by shouted silences, plays of light and shadow, and profound spirituality.
Web Reporter iscritta Wrep.EU. Ha studiato Sociologia presso Libera Università di Urbino.
Web Reporter iscritta Wrep.EU. Ha studiato Sociologia presso Libera Università di Urbino.